The Death Machine and the A.I. baby

Humans, tossed out and recycled

Increasingly reason’s hope from secular salvation shrieks shriller than screaming Cassandra, keens with a bloody head and hands from ripped hair fearing as the flesh became stone, seeing in the bright shield of day reason in a world without it.

While people often call our period the “Machine Age,” very few have any perspective on modern technics or any clear notion as to its origins. Popular historians usually date the great transformation in modern industry from Watt’s supposed invention of the steam engine; and in the conventional economics textbook the application of automatic machinery to spinning and weaving is often treated as an equally critical turning point. But the fact is that in Western Europe the machine had been developing steadily for at least seven centuries before the dramatic changes that accompanied the “industrial revolution” took place. Men had become mechanical before they perfected complicated machines to express their new bent and interest; and the will-to-order had appeared once more in the monastery and the army and the counting-house before it finally manifested itself in the factory. Behind all the great material inventions of the last century and a half was not merely a long internal development of technics: there was also a change of mind. Before the industrial precesses could take hold on a great scale, a reorientation of wishes, habits, ideas, goals was necessary. (Mumford-Technics and Civilization)

Gabriel Marcel: We must admit that in current phraseology what is called the dignity of the human being is described in terms of Kantism (here, by the way, reduced to its simplest expression). We refer to the idea according to which the inalienable value of man lies in the fact that he is a rational being, that stress is placed on his faculty of understanding and comprehending the intelligible order of the world, or rather on his faculty of conforming to certain maxims considered as universally valid.

Then in contrast to philosophy https://www.weforum.org/topics/artificial-intelligence-and-robotics

So extremely alienated humanity births the Sorcerer’s Apprentice from the global machine that accelerates lived time like a particle being cracked open a few times in the cyclotron

https://desfalt.wordpress.com/2022/06/06/technology-speed-and-war-paul-virilio-and-the-return-to-politics/

One important theme in Speed and Politics is deterritorialization. With the advent of sea and air travel, states are no longer bound to the earth. The aterritorial existence of the state provides us with a novel idea of violence under a dromocratic regime, where conflict is enacted on uneven terrain, and where the constant assessment of imbalances leads to indirect warfare (Virilio, 2006, p. 62). Violence becomes a relative phenomenon; it is no longer conceived as direct attacks through traditional methods, but of the coordination of unequal or unequally distributed territories. In short, it is the beginning of asymmetrical warfare, which is characterized by the significant differences in combatants as well as techniques and strategies. With deterritorialization, national armies can evade combat indefinitely and exert pressure via blockades, air raids, and embargos to “inflict permanent moral and material sufferings that dimmish [them] and melt [them] away” (Virilio, 2006, p. 63). With deterritorialization, the logistical basis of warfare is further developed through new considerations, such as the availability and production of weapons and “consumption of grenades by trench yard” and the emergence of Practical War (Virilio, 2006, p. 76). War moves from the region of space to time; time becomes determinative of survival in asymmetrical warfare. Despite not developing the concept of will, Virilio takes issue with the traditional definition of war as politics continued by other means provided by Carl von Clausewitz and states:

We cannot exclude from war the problem of wills, despite the fact the Clausewitz immediately mutilates and bastardizes his definition by hastening to add that there can be no moral violence outside the concepts of State and law. (Virilio, 2006, p. 97).

Virilio takes issue with Clausewitz’s definition of war because it presupposes already formed bodies with wills of their own, rather than historical constructs with ingrained, automatic tendencies. The modern state operates almost like a mechanical clock that, once turned on, will continue to operate based on its own momentum.

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/08/12/britains-military-russia-ukraine/

Americans are focused on their personal situation, not on the broad events that are altering their personal situation.  Insouciance, not awareness, is the American characteristic. Facing reality takes energy, time, strength and can be depressing.  Consequently, the society erodes.  Fight back!

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity